Nae Caranfil, now in mid-career, is Romania’s post-Revolution wonder. His breakthrough on the national and international scene with the sardonic È pericoloso sporgersi [Don’t Lean Out the Window] (1994) was uncompromising. Yes, it was another film about the horrors under the Communist regime, but in his film the viewers were forced to laugh at themselves, were forced to admit their own failure in accepting and playing a part in the whole travesty. Then, Caranfil made a film that spoke to Romanian hearts with honesty and despair, with lies that dramatised and truth that had one rolling with laughter.

The Rest Is Silence is haunted by the same mood. From the outset, we know the director is ready to play with us, that he can make us prone to forget the drama that is about to befall his characters in this true story of early Romanian cinema. We’re back in 1911, when Bucharest was nicknamed ‘Little Paris’, when the desire to justify its name transformed almost any ‘respectable’ individual into a culture pundit. Even working in the cloakroom at the National Theatre made one feel one belonged to the world of art. Crowds would gather to the funeral of the latest Hamlet. All young men dreamt of being stars of the stage. In this cohort we find 19-year old Grigore Brezeanu (Marius Florea Vizante), the son of the shortest but most popular actor of the time. Grig is also short, and probably too unglamorous to be the next Hamlet, and unsurprisingly he fails the entry exams for acting school. But Grig is hardly put out, as he has another dream: to become the first feature film director in Romania – and thus his father’s greatest disappointment for falling into the deplorable avenues of the cinematic world.

While it seems at first to be a battle between the decaying Theatre and the birth of Cinema, the film slowly transforms itself into a deep exploration of the passion for moving shadows, the passion for false images which deliver truth. Grig Brezeanu is not a Griffith or a Chaplin, but nor is he a notorious Ed Wood. He is just one of the plethora of ‘failed artists’ who found a life (and a source of income) in a technical invention that was adored by the poor craving for affordable entertainment, and despised by the rest for the fact that it was nothing but low entertainment (since they couldn’t believe anything so cheap could be worthwhile). Brezeanu felt, like many early aficionados, that cinema was capable of more. All that was needed was someone to invest seriously in a film that was long enough to become meaningful. The eccentric philistine Leon Negrescu (Ovidiu Niculescu) was to become Brezeanu’s wealthy godfather and then the zealous maker of his cinematic deathbed.

This was the first script Caranfil ever wrote, and back in 1988 Columbia refused it on the grounds that despite its brilliance, who would want to see a film ‘about an unknown filmmaker, who made an unknown film in an unknown country’, even if (we would add) this was two years prior to Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation (1914). What is so unique about this biopic is the way Caranfil treats his hero. Brezeanu is revered for his two-hour long epic Independenţa României [The War for Independence] (1912) – one of the longest films in cinematic history up to 1912 – but Caranfil is careful to show that maybe Brezeanu’s father was right in that his son is probably not an artist in the truest sense. (Actually, Brezeanu was only the producer of the feature, which was directed by Aristide Demetriade). He reminds us of a boy who has found a new toy and is content to be allowed to play with it freely (for Negrescu did give him a free hand in most circumstances). The game of making films has given him enough macho arrogance to tell an irritated and puzzled King Carol I of Romania (a charming Alexandru Hasnas) that it is he who ‘reigns’ as the creator of Romanian cinema.

The War of Independence did become a hit at the time, yet Caranfil’s script is careful not to suggest at any point that this success was necessarily an artistic one, not even when we are made to shiver by scenes of the euphoric debut. It is the wonder of film-making that is riveting, and Brezeanu’s passion is enough to justify its epoch-making status. Unlike theatre, cinema became the key to eternity. The truth of life would be framed as testament for generations and generations. It may not be the seventh art, but only cinema can bring past living humans to life. Their presence is almost felt. And who can fault young people like Grig for eccentricities, even if they want to reign into eternity with their work. The rest is silence, but at least Grigore Brezeanu gave us silent shadows that are vigorous and compassionate, irrespective of how ridiculous they look nearly a century on.

Caranfil is nostalgic and frivolous simultaneously. He is glad as a director that the pioneers fought for the independence of cinema as an art-form. More than that, in The Rest Is Silence we find a director who is truly comfortable with making cinema for the sake of it, treating the art as an end in itself. There is no meaning to it but the pure pleasure of watching films. It feels like a first film, even if comes nearly 20 years into the director’s career. Indeed, it is Caranfil’s first film financed completely by his homeland.